Digital Media

Alright now, you know-it-alls, show-it-alls, and tell-it-alls. It's time you people learned a little discipline, a little social decorum, a little good old fashioned discretion.

So here are the rules. No more Twittering. No more friending. And definitely no more updating people on your latest moods, feelings, lovers, and hangnails.

Yes, in what seems like a concerted effort on the part of traditional culture, two highly similar organizations, the Marines and the NFL, have decided to fight back against all the careless talk.

They have each reportedly begun to ban Twitter and Facebook.

Let's start with the Marines. According to CNN, a Marine Corps order has made the Corps' feelings known with characteristic subtlety: "These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user-generated content, and targeting by adversaries."

The enemy is lurking, Facebookers and Twitterers. Leave now.

The Marines' ban is supposed to last a year, after which time, presumably, it will be reassessed. And the Corps is extremely concerned about worms, Trojans and other items with nefarious purposes infecting its space.

However, this ban is not without its awkward strategic moments.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has, as of Tuesday, 4,423 followers on Twitter. (He's following Katie Couric, but not Bill O'Reilly, by the way.) Will he, too, fall under a Marine-style ban if it becomes military-wide?

This picture of the Marines did not come from Facebook or Twitter. Honest.

(Credit: CC Sister 72/Flickr)

There is, indeed, some doubt as to whether the ban has actually been enacted.

Thanks to Admiral Mullen's Twitter feed, I lucked upon a feed called Milblogging, which collates important military news and information.

It referred me to Wired.com, which quoted Price Floyd, the social-networking czar of the military, as saying that no decision had yet been made on a military-wide basis.

So have the Marines created an advance party before everyone else? It appears so.

Which leads us to the pioneers, at the NFL. The New York Times informs us that certain NFL teams appear to be chop-blocking social networking square in the back of the knees.

At the beginning of training camp, Green Bay Packers players were apparently told that they would be fined $1,701 (the NFL maximum) for texting or tweeting during a team function.

The Miami Dolphins do have their own Twitter page. But coach Tony Sparano, according to the Times, told players to lay off the tweets in order not to create additional distractions.

It's quite enough with NFL players taking guns to clubs (Plaxico Burress), organizing dog-fighting rings (Michael Vick), mowing down and killing pedestrians while drunk (Dante Stallworth), and showering strippers with cash and Cristal (Pac Man Jones). Who needs more socially dubious distractions?

But here's where the Marines and the NFL are very different.

Even though there are those who believe there are no secrets anymore, one can at least imagine that evildoers might scour the Marine personnel's personal sites for nuggets of information or vulnerability.

On the other hand, some might think that NFL players' behavior in tweeting from the locker room, the sidelines or even during games (as the Bengals' Chad Ocho Cinco threatened to do before the NFL said no) is just plain rude.

Yes, they might inadvertently reveal an ankle injury. But not half as much as they reveal their lack of class.

But an NFL player's career can be painfully short.

The average running back lasts perhaps three years. And very few players have contracts that guarantee them much more than this year and the next. So perhaps it's unsurprising that some players want to market themselves in any and every way they can in such a cynical environment.

One that is epitomized surely by college football coaches, some of whom have decided to tweet during games for one sole reason--to find a neat way around the NCAA rules regarding contact with recruits.

This behavior shows that the "here's what I'm feeling right now" culture is not confined to players, but to their bosses, too--if it suits their purposes.

Organizations that are based on values such as discipline and secrecy are not exactly well-suited to social networking.

It will be fascinating to see how they deal with this social phenomenon as time goes on--if they really manage to deal with it at all.

Yahoo has decided to punt rather than continue to oppose the National Football League's players union.

The company filed a notice of voluntary dismissal with the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota on Monday, effectively ending a lawsuit it filed just a month ago seeking a judgment that Yahoo shouldn't have to pay for access to the player stats needed to run a fantasy football Web site. The AP, which spotted the filing, reported that both Yahoo and the union declined to comment on the suit's dismissal.

Fantasy football requires a wealth of statistical information to tally points and cause armchair general managers to wonder what they were thinking when they drafted Matt Hasselbeck. Yahoo, buoyed by an earlier court decision involving fantasy stats that favored CNET parent company CBS Interactive, had been seeking a similar determination that it would not have to pay for access to the stats, which it alleged the players' union was threatening.

It's unclear exactly what led to the collapse of the suit, but perhaps Yahoo was given assurances that it wouldn't have to pay--at least this year--for fantasy stats. The players union is currently appealing the decision in the CBS Interactive case.

Yahoo's StatTracker, a premium service, provides fantasy team owners statistical updates on players moments after they're involved in plays (click image for closer look).

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo has filed a lawsuit against the NFL Players Association, contending that it shouldn't be forced to pay royalties for using players' names, statistics, and photos in its online fantasy football game because the information is publicly available.

The complaint (PDF), which was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for Minnesota, alleges that the players group has threatened to sue the Internet giant if it doesn't pay licensing fees for the information. Yahoo had licensing agreements with the players union for previous football seasons, but the last of those deals expired on March 1, according to the complaint.

Yahoo claims it no longer needs the union's permission to use the players' information, citing an April court decision in a similar case between the players group and CBS Interactive (the parent company of CNET). The court in that case found that CBS Interactive didn't have to pay for use of football players' names or statistics because the information was already in the public domain. The players association is currently appealing that decision.

Major League Baseball lost a similar case in 2007 to CBC Distribution and Marketing--a Missouri company that sells fantasy sports products via the Web, e-mail, regular mail, and phone. MLB's Internet media arm, later joined by the pro-baseball players' union, had claimed that CBC was using baseball players' names and statistics without a license, thereby violating the players' rights to publicity under state intellectual property laws.

CBC won at the district court level and again at the appeals court level, which held that the company's "first amendment rights in offering its fantasy baseball products supersede the players' rights of publicity."

The lawsuit asks the court to declare that Yahoo's fantasy game business does not violate any rights of publicity owned or controlled by the players group, and prevent the players group from interfering with or threatening Yahoo's fantasy game business.

As many as 15 million people participate in fantasy football leagues, generating more than $1 billion a year in revenue, according to court documents filed in that case.

Carl Francis, director of communications for the NFL Players Association, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Negotiations between sports-governing bodies and TV channels are often rather beguiling.

While News Corp.'s Fox, for example, built the fourth network with the NFL its most sturdy pillar, other channels seem to fall in and out of favor.

Now Comcast, which owns some channels and controls a seemingly infinite amount of cable, is threatening to remove the NFL Network from every last strand of cable because it feels that the NFL is not quite playing ball.

Comcast has never liked the 70-cents-per-subscriber fee that the NFL charges for the its total football network, which occasionally shows a live game or two but otherwise offers quite a lot of talking about football.

The NFL seems to have gone to the Federal Communications Commission to complain that the NFL Network isn't offered as part of Comcast's standard sports package, while Versus (oh, yes, those wonderful NHL playoffs are coming!) and the Golf Channel, both owned by Comcast, are.

Comcast, on the other hand, would dearly, and understandably, like to get hold of NFL Sunday Ticket, a channel that allows those who got out of places like Cincinnati and Tampa to still enjoy their home team's games live. Currently, they can do this only on Direct TV.

Naturally, both sides are offering some necessary roughness, as the current NFL Network-Comcast deal expires May 1.

Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen offered this long bomb to The Wall Street Journal: "In the palace of truth and justice, all these channels probably belong on a sports tier, but the leagues are not willing to do that."

Yes, not the Palace of Auburn Hills. The gilded Palace of Truth and Justice.

"Yo, how many of you can make it to my place Thursday for the NFL Network Game? I got Direct TV."

(Credit: CC Monica's Dad/Flickr)

However, Steve Bornstein, chief executive of the NFL, offered his own strike down the middle, despite the close attentions of a ruthless safety or two: "Some cable operators talk out of two sides of their mouths...One minute, they say it's about the price, the next, they're saying it's about access to Sunday Ticket."

Is he suggesting someone might not be telling the truth? A personal foul, surely.

Will the FCC turn out to be the referee on this one? Will the two sides reach a hard-fought, swimmingly reasonable compromise along the lines of, oh, I don't know, the Camp David agreement?

When so much money clasps its hands around a beloved national sport, it's sometimes easy to forget that people just want to watch the games they want to watch without hooking up woks on their roof or cables around their wallpaper.

Strangely, the former commissioner of the NFL, the weirdly somnolent Paul Tagliabue, believes that baseball got something right, specifically concerning the way it launched their MLB Network. Cable had first dibs on out-of-market games. Then MLB Network appeared as part of a basic digital package.

I know that many people have never understood why the NFL gave exclusive rights to Direct TV for its Sunday Ticket. I mean, it's not as if you have to wok your chimney to watch other important events--like "American Idol" and "Dancing with the Stars"--happening elsewhere.

I know you'll tell me that it all has to do with money. But one might have thought that there would have been a far larger market out there if the out-of-town games were offered across multiple platforms.

Look, I'm a San Diego Chargers fan. I don't live in San Diego. I have cable. Ergo, I spend a lot of winter Sundays in sports bars.

Please, wealthy people of commerce, will you sing from the same playbook and help me improve my diet and my lifestyle? Thank you.

If you thought that watching football in high definition seemed more realistic, just wait until you can view a game in 3D.

Next week the National Football League is broadcasting live in 3D a game between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders to theaters in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. The event, to be held December 4, is a demonstration to show how the technology can be used to provide a more realistic experience in a theater or in the home.

The NFL has invited representatives from consumer electronics companies to view the event in an effort to drum up support. In addition to showing the game on a big 3D screen, the demonstration will include television displays to show what could be possible in people's homes, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some consumer electronics makers have already begun making 3D television sets, mostly to accommodate DVDs that are available in 3D. But the industry is still working on standards for 3D.

Just as live sports entertainment has pushed the adoption of high-definition TVs, it could also help drive standards efforts and adoption of 3D TVs.

Burbank-based 3ality Digital will shoot the game with special 3D cameras and transmit the game via satellite service to the three theaters. Real D 3D is providing the displays in the theaters and is overseeing production and transmission of the 3D broadcast.

This isn't the first time that the NFL has demonstrated 3D technology. In 2004, it filmed the Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers in 3D. Sandy Climan, the CEO of 3ality, told The Wall Street Journal that when he shows the footage from the taped 3D Super Bowl, "people crouch down to catch the ball. It's as if the ball is coming into your arms."

Even though other live events like operas and circuses have been broadcast live in 3D to theaters around the country, the event on December 4 will be the first time that the NFL has broadcast a game live using the technology.

Adobe Systems' Flash technology may not have qualified for the Olympics, but it is in tip-top shape for the National Football League season just getting under way.

With the bulk of NFL teams hitting the gridiron in earnest Sunday, it'll be Flash that delivers the live video streaming on the Web of NBC's Sunday Night Football games. This marks the first time that full-length NFL games are widely available online in the U.S., according to Adobe and the NFL.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

The NFL-Adobe partnership wouldn't normally be quite so notable--after all, Flash is one of the most well-established technologies on the Web. But it was only a few short weeks ago that NBC had delivered streaming video from the Beijing Olympics courtesy of a technology that's looking to overturn Flash's dominance: Microsoft Silverlight.

The Olympics deal no doubt stuck in Adobe's craw; NBC has said that it initially expected to use Flash for the Olympics. Adobe's press release on the NFL deal certainly doesn't mention the upstart Silverlight by name, but it does get in a subtle bit of trash-talking--the widespread, existing installation of Flash on desktop PCs "will enable fans to access NFL games on the Web without having to download additional software."

Anyone who wanted to watch NBC's online streaming of the Olympics first had to download Silverlight, an additional step that some folks may not have been ready to take.

Its name notwithstanding, the Web-streamed Sunday Night Football Extra (delivered via NFL.com and NBCSports.com) made its debut Thursday, with the season's inaugural game between the Washington Redskins and last season's Super Bowl champions, the New York Giants. On Sunday, the streaming video will start up on its namesake day with the Week 1 nighttime contest between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts.

Beyond the live streaming, fans get some interactive extras, including alternative camera angles, in-game highlights, live statistics, and a live blog.

The experience may be something of a mixed bag. Writing at Silicon Alley Insider, Michael Learmouth had this to say about Thursday night's streaming video:

We gave it a try and there were some hiccups. Inititally, we couldn't get the live stream, and were told we had been placed in a queue 'due to overwhelming demand.'

Once the video began, it was pixelated and jumpy, and there's no full-screen mode. But there were some cool features, such as a 'star cam' trained on individual players like Fred Smoot and Plaxico Burress.

We were asked to watch a Sprint pre-roll ad to get to the video, and there were a few online ads within the broadcast, but not nearly as many as on TV. In fact, during most TV ad breaks, online viewers were sent to the NFL network studio for recaps of other games, which is nice but perhaps a sign advertising for the Webcast wasn't sold out.

As for the Flash-Silverlight competition, that will have to play itself out over time. As noted by Paul Glazowski at the Mashable blog:

It's not an impossibility for Silverlight to grow, mind you. Given the right level of attention to the platform, Microsoft could mark its Olympic foray as only the first big starter in the long slog toward mass adoption. But 'could' is the key word. The hill climbs (yes, climbs plural) will be trying.

One key challenge, Glazowski says, is "to convince the public of its validity and utility in the presence" of a "semi-household" name like Flash.